Free Vigilante by Sarah Fine Page B

the authority of the Judge. But at some point before Ana arrived in the dark city, a captured Mazikin had told Malachi that killing a possessed body freed the imprisoned soul from the Mazikin city.
    Malachi had latched onto that possibility like a drowning man. It meant that he could do something for the Mazikin victims. He could free them. All the fighting, the slaughter, the suffering, none of it had to be in vain. And in all the years she’d known him, he’d been a cold, calculating machine, a near-perfect Guard, one who rivaled Takeshi in terms of his strength and cunning. One she’d learned to respect. They’d worked well together. Ana hadn’t been sure she believed Malachi, though.
    Not until Takeshi was taken.
    After that, she’d clung to the possibility that possessed souls could be freed just as desperately as Malachi had. Together, they’d all but exterminated the Mazikin infestation in the dark city, fueled by that fantasy.
    A fantasy was exactly what it was, she realized, staring at the black city crouched beneath the acid sky. Both of them had wanted to believe that they could save Takeshi, that he was at peace, that they had spared him pain and made it possible for him to be free.
    They’d been wrong. Takeshi wasn’t free. He was a prisoner in that city.
    The Mazikin city.
    Mazikin were brutal animals, even if they did look human. Ana could tell by the way they moved, by their four-legged lopes, by their bared teeth and claws. She’d heard their growls and felt their jaws close around her limbs often enough to know they were creatures of hell.
    Creatures of hell that had Takeshi at their mercy.
    Her bare toes curled into rough sand. She was standing at the edge. She had a choice:
    She could spend her days in heaven. Or she could walk into hell.
    Both options were risky. As she stared across the desert, a keening cry drew her eyes up to circling carrion birds, each of them with wingspans longer than a man was tall. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a movement near a massive field of brambles and looked in time to see a hunched creature raise a club and charge forward. She lost sight of him as he dove into some kind of burrow. There were people out there, and animals, too. Anything that lived in a place so inhospitable would be interested in only one thing: survival at any cost. There was a chance she’d never make it to that city, that one of those birds would swoop from the sky and sink its talons through her flesh.
    But if she stayed in the Countryside, she was just as doomed. Takeshi’s face would haunt her forever.
    The Mazikin c a me from behind her, probably thinking she was a helpless suicide. She might as well have been, for all the fight she gave him. A huge man with slabs of muscle wrapped over iron-thick bones, he crushed her to the ground, grinding the air from her lungs, pinning her arms beneath her so she couldn’t reach her knives. Inky panic washed over her thoughts, and all her training deserted her. Suddenly, she was back on the dirt floor of her parents’ shanty home, having everything that mattered ripped away.
    The Mazikin screamed, long and loud, like a child. He rolled off her, still yowling but the sound was muted by the crash of metal on metal and shuffling feet. He let out an agonized roar ; then the floor shook as his body landed heavily next to her, eyes empty.
    Steely arms coiled around her, lifting her from the floor, pressing her against a chest containing a galloping heart. “I heard you cry out,” Takeshi said between ragged breaths . “I guess this building wasn’t deserted after all.”
    She had no words. She was still fighting to pull away from the past. She wrapped her arms around his waist and held on tight, burying her face against the hard leather of his armor. He leaned back and tipped up her chin, and he must have read the terror in her eyes, because he said, “Come back, Ana. I’m here.” His voice was so gentle, frayed with worry but still